The Stone Boy (25 page)

“Before telling you why I’m here, I wanted to tell you how saddened I was by your mother’s death and how much I regret not having had the courage to come to see you sooner.”

She crossed her legs. She winced slightly. She must have a bad back—or what she had to say weighed heavily on her heart.

“I can’t say that I knew your mother well—I only saw her once. But I can’t get it out of my mind that I was partly responsible for her death.”

Martin came back down to earth with a thud. He was looking at an alien. No one had ever expressed such feelings toward his mother.

“You know that she had made an official report for the police logbook. After her statement, I contacted her so that we could meet.”

“The police lieutenant filled me in. She brought you a photo of an abused child, is that right?”

“I saw her on Monday, the twenty-sixth of October, five days before the attack. And I called her back on Thursday to tell her that I couldn’t do anything, because aside from her report, there was no evidence that a child of the age she described was in close contact with the neighbors. That’s when she told me about the photo.”

“But no one ever saw that photo.”

“No. But I know that it exists.”

“Really?”

“Last week, Sevran contacted the photo labs in town.”

“Sevran has reopened the investigation?”

“A man confirmed having printed the blurry pictures found at your mother’s during the search. But he also remembered having made enlargements of another photo that wasn’t among them—one of the face of a little boy with dark curly hair, aged about seven or eight.”

“Why did the police reopen the case?”

“Because something happened at the Desmoulins’ house.”

Valérie lowered her eyes, embarrassed.

“Could we go outside somewhere to talk about it? A café?”

The bistro in the market square wasn’t at all welcoming. On this rainy October day, the windows were steamed up, and nothing could have warmed the fake leather banquettes. Sitting in the back of the room by the bay window, the man and woman drank coffees sticky as pitch. With her coat hanging over her shoulders, Valérie brought her face close to Martin’s.

“Ordinarily, I would never have the right to bring up ongoing cases, but because I know you and because I feel partially responsible, I wanted to speak to you about it before Sevran called you. He’s a good policeman. He’s very good at his job. And I very much like working with him. But I think that this time he was backing the wrong horse.”

“Valérie, tell me what you know.”

She sat up straight and placed her palms on the Formica table.

“Philippe Desmoulins was charged with involuntary manslaughter and was released on police bail until the trial. But at his lawyer’s request, the condition that he appear at the police station was dropped after seven months by the judge. The Desmoulins sold the house and left the area.”

“Where did they go?”

“We don’t know.”

“What do you mean?”

“The address that they gave their lawyer was fake.”

Martin ran a hand through his hair. He gave himself an odd cowlick at the top of his head.

“Shit! Was my mother right? Was that bastard hitting his kid?”

“That’s not all. The new owners moved in in August. Two weeks ago, they had water damage in the house. They had to redo the floor in the kitchen, and they got some contractors in. The workers started by pulling up the floating floorboards. And there, inside a broom cupboard, they found a trapdoor. A locked trapdoor.”

Martin slumped on the banquette.

“Would the police have passed it by?”

“Martin, no one ever believed that a child existed. The police forensic team didn’t see anything because they didn’t look. The guys from the lab examined the back of the cupboard where your mother had hit. They testified that there were breezeblocks behind the wooden paneling, and that was the end of it. They didn’t probe the floor. In the crime scene photos—”

“You saw them?”

“Sevran showed me a few bits of the file. We’re very friendly,” she added, blushing. “In one of the shots, you can see lots of stuff crammed down into the bottom of the cupboard: household cleaners, basins, sponges, a shovel, a broom… The kind of mess that nobody would think of removing to see what was underneath.”

Martin took a deep breath and made a sign to the barman.

“Go ahead, Valérie.”

“The new owners are from Paris. A young couple with two children. They didn’t know about the tragedy that took place in their house. Can you imagine? I wouldn’t want to be the agent who sold them the house… But the contractors, they knew, and they thought it was better to contact the police before touching the trapdoor.”

Martin raised his hand higher.

“Excuse me! Brandy.”

“Two!” Valérie corrected him.

The barman called back the order from the bar. Valérie continued with her story on fast-forward: “So Sevran rolls up and has the trapdoor opened. It gives onto a windowless room with a low ceiling that must have originally been a storeroom. On the ground they found a mattress, half-burned and bloodstained, along with an iron bar… They took loads of swabs…”

Martin had both elbows on the table and covered his mouth with his fists.

“The kid was there.”

“Sevran isn’t so sure of that,” said Valérie flatly.

The barman brought over the little glasses of alcohol. They emptied them in a few gulps. Martin put Valérie’s coat back on her shoulders.

“Martin, when your mother came to see me, I believed her. Without a shadow of a doubt. She trusted me. And then, after she assaulted her neighbors, I learned from my colleagues what she had done to your son. So I thought that she had imagined the mistreated child. Like everyone else. I wanted to believe her story.”

“You did your job. You couldn’t do anything else.”

“We don’t even know who the boy is… God knows where he is now, what he’s going through…”

She looked down at her handbag, searching for a tissue.

“Sorry. I never cry, shit… Tears never helped anyone.”

Martin gently caressed her cheek.

“This time they did.”

At three o’clock, a retired couple and two African mothers with their babies were sitting in the waiting room. Martin gave himself ten minutes to call Audrette and filled her in on his meeting with the social worker. He promised to come home as soon as possible, but wasn’t able to leave the surgery until seven forty-five. When he arrived back home, he was surprised that Audrette hadn’t thought to turn on the garden lights outside. There weren’t lights on inside the house, either. The table wasn’t set, and there was nothing simmering in the kitchen.

“Audrette? You home?”

Martin turned on the light. Audrette was sitting on the sofa, stock still, her round belly visible.

“What’s wrong?” Martin asked, worried. “What are you doing in the dark?”

He knelt down beside her and took her hands in his.

“Are you not feeling well? Your hands are burning up… Is it the baby? Are you having contractions?”

“No.”

Martin put a hand on her forehead, then grasped her left wrist to check her pulse. Audrette pulled back her arm.

“I’m fine, Martin, it’s not that.”

He stood back up. There were dark circles under her eyes and her face was drawn. She looked overwrought.

“Did something happen to your parents?” he asked, sitting at her side.

She shook her head, staring at her belly.

“Darling, you’re worrying me, tell me what’s happened.”

“Just now, when you phoned, you spoke about the child that your mother might have seen in the neighbors’ garden, who looked like Bastien.”

“Yes?”

“You said it might not have been her crazy imagination.”

“It’s more than likely,” he said, putting an arm around his wife’s shoulders.

“I know where the photo is that the police are looking for.”

Martin asked Audrette to repeat what she had just said.

“Do you remember the day that the policeman came to the house to say that he was closing the case?”

“Yes.”

“A package came in the mail.”

“A package from your parents, for Christmas.”

Audrette didn’t answer. Her husband blinked.

“… My mother? Mum sent me something?”

“I don’t know what came over me. I couldn’t deal with your mother anymore. She was destroying our lives, she was destroying you. The package that she had addressed to you, it was… I didn’t want her to hurt you anymore. I tore open a corner of the package, and I saw these photos…”

She lifted her right hand gently. Audrette was holding two photographs that her belly was hiding from Martin. One was an enlargement of the other. He seized the enlargement and scrutinized the blurry contours of the child’s face. Black curly hair, cheeks pale and hollow.

“Good Lord!”

“He looks so much like Bastien…”

Martin stopped himself from retching. He put the enlargement down on the coffee table and got up, not knowing what to do with his hands.

“Where were the photos?”

“In a drawer in my office,” she murmured. “For almost a year.”

“What else was there in the package?”

“Notebooks. Five notebooks.”

“What did you do with them?”

“They’re here, in the house.”

Martin stamped his feet.

“Well, there’s a stroke of luck, you didn’t throw them out.”

“Removing them, yes; destroying them, no. Your mother would have come back from the dead to punish me,” she joked.

“Stop talking rubbish. Did you read them?”

“I didn’t open them. I couldn’t bear the thought of reading horrible things about our son, you, or me.”

Martin tried to remain calm by pacing the length and breadth of the room.

“An investigation was underway, my mother was between life and death, a life that she had just risked to save the life of a kid, and you didn’t even wonder if those photos and notebooks might have been of some importance?”

“I wanted to protect you, Martin. You weren’t at all well.”

He glared at Audrette, took three steps towards the bay window, and pressed his forehead against it.

“I did it for your own good, I promise you.”

The contact with the frozen glass surprised him. Outside in the shadowy garden, the bluish specter of a cedar tree loomed.

“Tell me where the notebooks are.”

“I put them in your office.”

Martin snatched up the photos. Audrette snapped out of it. She held her belly, looking guilty.

“I didn’t want… I’m sorry…”

“Not as sorry as I am!” he shouted, leaving the room.

Audrette ate alone at about nine o’clock. She took her husband a glass of wine and sandwiches on sliced bread. At ten, she went back to get the plate and empty glass, and quietly wished him good night.

Martin, absorbed by his reading, didn’t respond.

Each notebook was about a specific period. The oldest went back to January 1997, six months before Elsa Préau decided to put an end to her days and those of her grandson. The moleskin cover was faded and the pages dog-eared here and there. Martin didn’t open it right away. He was wary of that whole period and dreaded reading what Audrette termed “horrible things,” preferring to get into the more recent ones.

Three notebooks had been written in the rest home that Dr. Mamnoue had recommended to her, in Hyères, where she had spent the last ten years. She consigned her dreams to it, the dinners that she cooked in her kitchenette, the annoying habits of her neighbors whose moans and snores could be heard through the partition walls, observations of numerous birds frequenting the residence’s park, summaries of her reading… Many repeated the same words that she had used in her letters to her son twice a month. Martin noticed a considerable number of notes based on the archives and documents from the historical society of the town of his birth: there was a commentary on a document dating from 1614, going back to the first parish registry. Did his mother send herself photocopies of the documents by mail? By all appearances, she had begun genealogical research into her ancestors. One note had been dedicated to Philippe Angélique de Froissy, who in 1718 married François Henri, the Count of Ségur, forebear of Sophie Rostopchine, Countess of Ségur. Was Elsa Préau related to a grand dame of children’s literature, or was it pure fantasy? As he flipped through the pages, Martin slipped into the private life of a mother whose mind wandered into a thousand things, commenting on the scandal of agricultural prices dropping for farmers and improving as manmade air pollution increased. Pages in which she discussed her memories were rare. Only one had to do with her maternal grandmother, Deborah, when she took Elsa as a child to walk along the Marne on Sunday.